Dead Gnomes Society

Leading a guild with over 400 characters and over 100 unique accounts is a royal pain in the ass. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

But a lot of coordination has fallen to me over the years. Placing players into raid groups, coordinating schedules, listening to players wants/needs/demands, making the right decisions, “Aly we should do this”…. “Aly we shouldn’t do that”… Anything I do as a GL reflects on the guild as a whole. Anything I don’t do….(cue Marcia Brady voice) It’s been Aly, Aly, ALY! What happens when a guild leader needs a break? Take one? See if there’s a guild to come back to? For the record, the longest “break” I ever took was about 2 weeks when I moved across the country. And then I moved back again without taking another break. I’ve played this game since 2007 and never missed a tier since. I’m probably second in the running of Iron Man behind Mavros. Seriously, that dude doesn’t even sleep.

But I’m a control freak. I didn’t really quite realize it until I was forced to share the control with the rest of the guild’s leaders. I realized how much I used the pronoun “I” instead of “we” when talking about leading the guild. I realized that if I didn’t agree with what others wanted to do, we ended up just not doing it. I realized that if I wanted to do something badly enough, without everyone else on board, they would reluctantly support me and we would end up forcing it with disastrous consequences (ahem, starting MOP with 4 raid teams anyone?). I realized that I had to work with MT’s officers, not against them by trying to force them to work with me. I realized Star only wanted what’s best for the guild and was not afraid to stand up for it and convinced me I was wrong. I realized that’s one of the reasons why she’s my best friend in the whole wide world of warcraft.

So now we’re a team. A real team. Star, Reluu and I. We’re all equals in leading MT. To affirm this, we created a baby druid named “alystarreluu” (of COURSE it has to be a druid!) to occupy the default “Guild Master” rank. And no, I’ll never tell whose toon it actually is. The three of us now share a new rank that we called “Guild Mistress”, because after all, chicks rule.